This special issue proposes that the semiotically theorized concept of 'qualia' is useful for anthropologists working on problems of the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Qualia are experiences of sensuous qualities (such as colors, textures, sounds, and smells) and feelings (such as satiety, anxiety, proximity, and otherness). The papers in this issue, first presented in a conference in honor of Nancy Munn and her groundbreaking book, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (1986), offer ethnographic accounts of the discursive, historical, and political conditions under which sensations come to be understood as being sensations of qualities -the qualia of softness, lightness, clarity, pain, stink, etc. -and in which those qualia are endowed with cultural value, whether positive or negative. The papers in this issue demonstrate that qualia are not just subjective mental experiences but rather sociocultural events of 'qualic' -and qualitative -orientation and evaluation. These papers thus provide models for the analysis of experience by calling into question what counts for social groups as the senses, materiality or immateriality, interiority, embodiment, or exteriority. KeywordsNancy Munn, qualia, qualisign, C.S. Peirce Sociocultural anthropology has always been interested in the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Our discipline is fundamentally concerned with the perceptible qualities of the world: looks, tastes, sounds, smells, and feels. We are interested in qualities insofar as qualities are interesting to people -even if sometimes these interests are not explicitly stated, but remain only obscure points of orientation. We focus not so much on the material properties of things as on people's reported experiences of and reflections on what they perceive to be their qualities. To emphasize

This review addresses general anthropological understandings of practice and a technical semiotic approach to pragmatics through the concept of qualia. Qualia are pragmatic signals (indexes) that materialize phenomenally in human activity as sensuous qualities. The pragmatic role of qualia is observed through exemplary accounts of the "feeling of doing" from the ethnographic record of practice in four domains: linguistic practices, phatic practices organized explicitly around social relations, practices organized around external "things," and body-focal practices. Attention to qualia enables anthropologists to consider ethnographically what is continuous semiotically across and within practices-from communication to embodiment. The article concludes with a discussion of praxis in relation to practice and pragmatics and offers suggestions for future research on qualia in the areas of awareness, language, and ritual.

This paper explores the ascendancy of 'softness' in South Korea as it is experienced through the qualia of one of Korea's most important social rituals: drinking soju. I combine an analysis of ethnographic evidence with widely-distributed advertisements to show how the experience of an abstract quality, softness, is made concrete by the cultural-semiotic renderings -and genderings -of alcohol consumption in various sensory modalities, including gustation, audition, kinaesthesis, and states of overall drunkenness. I introduce the concept of 'qualic transitivity' to account for the crossmodal perception of qualia as instances of the same quality. I argue that dramatic shifts in the qualia of soju and its consumption are emblematic of a higher-order change in how the ideal relationship between liquor and gender is being reconceptualized in contemporary South Korean society.

A B S T R A C TThis article develops a Peircean conceptualization of qualia as "facts of firstness" by examining the pedagogical pragmatics of a voice lesson in which an intersubjective orientation to vocal sound via listening becomes a subjective orientation to voice production via bodily feeling. I focus specifically on various attempts by a teacher and a student collaboratively to repair and cultivate the student's voice by generating and isolating qualia across proprioceptive and introspective dimensions. By tracing the sensuous semiotic modes through which qualia become crucial pragmatic signals in the process of "opening" the student's throat, I demonstrate how these facts of firstness function as cultural emergents that are produced by and accessible through communicative, interactional, intersubjective conduct.

This paper explores the cultural significance of a type of audible gesture in Korean speech that I call the Fricative Voice Gesture (FVG). I distinguish between two forms of this gesture: the reactive FVG, which serves as a self‐standing utterance that signals personally felt intensity, and the prosodic FVG, which can be superimposed upon an utterance as a form of intensification. Based on an ethnographically informed analysis of interviews, Christian sermons, and advertisements for soju, a Korean spirit, in South Korea, I view the interdiscursive link between reactive and prosodic FVGs in terms of the ongoing cultural revalorization of the sound shape. I focus in particular on the shift from harsher to softer FVGs—and their omission altogether—according to different, but related, paradigms of social differentiation such as class, gender, and age. [voice, gesture, prosody, intensification, korean, South Korea]